DCU leads EU research initiative to shed light on online extremism
DCU leads EU research initiative to shed light on online extremism
Policy makers, media and increasingly the public believe the internet plays a role in contemporary violent extremist activities and, potentially, ‘real world’ terrorism; now DCU is leading an international research team to investigate this area in a major EU initiative.
Dr Maura Conway, senior lecturer in international security at DCU’s School of Law and Government, is coordinator of the VOX-Pol network for research into violent online political extremism. The cross-disciplinary network is backed by €5.1 million in EU funding and includes scholars from social science, communication studies, criminology, psychology and computer science. Joining DCU in the project are prestigious partner research institutions such as Oxford University, King’s College London and University College London, as well as others in Germany, Hungary, India, the Netherlands and the US.
The aim of the five-year project is to shed light on how violent jihadists, nationalist-separatists, and extreme right-wing groups use online media to spread violent extremist content and determine the effects of this. Very little research has been done to date in this area.
Dr Conway believes the research is necessary because of the hype that exists around exactly how prominent a role the internet plays. “We’re hoping to make an evidence-based contribution to the debate and dispense with the anecdotes and assumptions being made, and bring good social science research to the table,” she says.
For example, Islamic State [IS] is highly active on several social media platforms, supposedly as a recruiting tool to attract young people to the Syria conflict. “The idea is that they consume content produced by IS, they interact with it and become immersed in that scene and it encourages them to travel and get involved,” says Dr Conway.
However, the evidence is not as clear-cut because of the overlap between online and real-life social networks. “We have to take into account the overlap with ‘real life’ or face-to-face contact also,” says Dr Conway. “I think it’s a complicated intermingling of young people’s real and online lives and the way in which a lot of young people spend a lot of time online, are heavy social media users so it’s very difficult to pull those things apart or seek to separate them.”
In its first year, VOX-Pol ran five events, including a summer school in DCU and a major conference in Kings College London where participants included not just academic researchers but contributors from law enforcement, policy makers and social media companies. The group plans to publish several reports from these events, which attracted 232 participants from 32 countries. Last year, the project’s website, www.voxpol.eu, attracted 7,000 users from 125 countries.